Journal of Italian Translation

Lina Insana/Primo Levi
theatrical audience) to come to a conclusion based on the survivor’s “tale,”
while in “Cromo” Levi’s focus is his urgent need to purify himself, to rid
himself of the albatross hanging around his own neck through storytelling.
Though these paraphrastic references to the Ancient Mariner character
date to 1966, his explicit citation and translation of one specific four-verse
stanza brought this affinity to its culmination in the last few years of his life,
inspiring not only the 1984 poem “Il superstite,” but the title of its entire
collection, Ad ora incerta (1984), and the incipit of his last book, I sommersi e i
salvati (1986): “Since then, at an uncertain hour,/ That agony returns:/ And
till my ghastly tale is told,/ This heart within me burns” (vv. 582-85). The
consistency with which Levi returns to the Coleridge text and its protagonist
challenges us to reckon with their importance as figures for Levi’s testimonial
project. Moreover, Levi’s active mediation of his source text demands
that this reckoning occur on the terrain of translation, both on the level of
theme (the citing, recoding and traumatic retelling that are central to
Coleridge’s text), and on the formal level (the specific acts of citation and
[mis] translation that occur within the textual space of Levi’s poem).
“Il superstite”
The first line of the oft-cited Coleridge passage (v. 582) is reproduced
tale quale, as the first verse of Levi’s poem: “Since then, at an uncertain hour”.
The second line is Levi’s translation of the first, faithfully done, and represented
in regular type: “Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta.” This is followed in
the third verse by a close translation of Coleridge’s next line (v. 583), “That
agony returns” (“Quella pena ritorna”), and then a significantly altered
rendering of the next two verses, to which we will soon return.
Remarkably, despite critical unanimity regarding the role of the Fenoglio
translation in familiarizing Levi with the poem, Levi’s translation of the
verses from the “Rime” is clearly original. Fenoglio’s translation of vv. 582-
85 reads: “Da quel momento, a un’ora imprecisa,/ Quell’agonia mi torna;/ E
fino a che non ho detta la mia storia/ Di morti, dentro mi brucia il cuore.”
Levi’s version, instead, reads: “Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,/ Quella pena
ritorna,/ E se non trova chi lo ascolti/ Gli brucia in petto il cuore.” Of particular
note in a casual comparison between the source text and Fenoglio’s
and Levi’s translation of it is the fact that the former’s addition of “Di morti”
in verse 585—made, one assumes, to approximate Coleridge’s original
tetrameter—does not materialize in Levi’s translation, leading us to believe
that Levi was translating from Coleridge directly and not from Fenoglio’s
1964 translation. As we shall soon see, Levi’s omission of Fenoglio’s unfaithful
reference to death provides not only textual proof of his direct relationship
to the Coleridge source text, but also helps to interrogate ostensibly
clear distinctions between life and death, “sommersi” and “salvati.”
Starting with v. 6, Levi’s “Il superstite” then makes a transition from
the Coleridge source text and his interpretation of it to a more properly “origi-
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